It was August 2011, and a lone Public Safety Canada cyber-security official wanted to take a trip to Las Vegas to meet with the experts on cracking into government systems: hackers.
The trip is one of several that Public Safety and defence officials made in the last year to hacker conferences as they try to get ahead of hackers by learning from hackers themselves. Reports from attendees suggest the government is increasingly seeing hacker conferences as an invaluable resource and that the government should spend more to send more IT security officials to hacker conferences.